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Power play: solving Ontario’s energy woes

I agree with Martin Regg Cohn, electricity in Ontario has a complex past. The three main parties all bear some blame. For what they did or failed to do.

Mr. Cohn’s article focuses on electricity generation and its source. Both our neighbours’ natural topography allows for generation of abundant, naturally renewable, clean, reliable power. It’s also cheaper. Why do we need to reinvent the wheel? Just buy it, until an alternate source is proven.

Power generation caused most of the debt and was supposed to have been privatized in the 1990s. Yet, the provincial government continues to put billions into an energy source for which there’s no process to neutralize or renew the waste.

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Now the transmission and distribution of electricity is about to go the same route. Don’t make the same mistake with Hydro One.

Rob Goheen, Oshawa

Martin Regg Cohn has given us his take on electric costs in Ontario. He does not however seem to remember that Ontario Hydro was created to supply Ontario with electricity at cost and was 100 per cent owned by the people of Ontario. Then under Liberal and Tory governments the people lost their ownership and control of Ontario Hydro.

We had the David Peterson government that closed Hydro (water power) to go nuclear, and we had a large part of the provincial debt off loaded on to Ontario Hydro to make the government look good.

Then we had the Tory government under Mike Harris break up and sell (privatize) the money making side of Hydro. We have CEOs making huge amounts of money and now we have another Liberal government wanting to sell more of Ontario Hydro to please their Bay St. friends.

So yes we can expect Hydro rates to go up and the real reason is that, Liberal or Tory, it’s the same old story: we have another government working to help Bay St. not Main St.

John Deamer, Wasaga Beach

Columnist Martin Regg Cohn barely mentions the nuclear reactors that provide 60 per cent of Ontario’s power, a deficiency partly made up for by Robert Benzie and Rob Ferguson, “Q&A: Ontario’s electricity.” They correctly point out that nuclear reactors are actually very expensive, and that disposing of nuclear waste is difficult.

Nowhere is it mentioned that even the routine production of nuclear power raises the level of radioactive pollution in our environment, which has been proven to have large-scale health effects, although these can be difficult to document. However, the ultimate argument against nuclear energy is the risk of disaster that goes with it.

Premier Wynne has recently given the go-ahead for expensive refurbishment of Ontario’s nuclear reactors. And yet, it seems, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has just slapped a $31,690 fine on Ontario Power Generation for failing to comply with the licensing conditions at the Pickering plant.

This plant was designed to last until 2015, and its current license expires in 2018. It needs to be closed then, at the latest. Apparently this sanction was not taken very seriously, and a lax safety and compliance culture continues.

Nuclear stations are deceptively clean and calm in their outward functioning, and it is easy for their operators to become complacent. This is what seems to have happened at Chernobyl.

I live northwest of Darlington and Pickering. Under the prevailing winds an accident would devastate this area. With different winds, Toronto could become an abandoned shell.

Why risk all this, or the possibility of disaster by enemy or terrorist attack, when we can have clean, renewable, power that is getting ever cheaper, in the form of surplus hydro from Quebec, wind, solar, and sheer efficiency?

Jenny Carter, Peterborough

The sidebar accompanying Martin Regg Cohn’s report erroneously states that electricity cannot be stored. Not only can electricity be stored, but Ontario is one of the leading jurisdictions in North America to deploy energy storage facilities that help integrate renewable sources of generation and provide services that help keep our power grid in balance.

It’s a good news story. Energy storage technologies can store surplus electricity over longer periods, as well as manage short-term variations in minutes and imbalances in supply and demand over the course of a day.

Surplus power typically occurs when there is low demand (e.g. at night). Using energy storage facilities to save the excess for when it is most needed (e.g. daytime peaks) makes more sense than paying others to take the surplus.

We are an industry association that represents energy storage technology companies, project developers, local distribution companies, and others. We are part of the solution today, and believe energy storage will provide greater flexibility and emissions reductions for Ontario’s power grid in the future.

Hurray! The only reason for rebuilding our nuclear reactors just turned out to be insignificant. On Dec. 29, professor Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University reported astounding news: “Nuclear is not carbon free and emits 6-24 times more carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions than wind per unit energy produced over the same 100-year period.” Thus disappears the last excuse for wasting at least $25 billion.

Jacobson and colleagues show how the long delays in building/rebuilding reactors compare poorly with wind, water and solar. (For more detail, look up Jacobson’s response to James Hansen.)

Our Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli must lose no time in changing his government’s plans. Ontario has many citizens calling for help, and the billions to be saved are urgently needed.

William Shore, Sutton

Urbanites such as Mr. Cohn have no clue as to the scale of environmental destruction Ontario government’s “green” industrial wind and solar projects are wreaking across Ontario for 6 per cent wind and 1 per cent solar energy when these facilities are actually operating.

Habitats for numerous species at risk are being lost right across the land, tens of thousands of trees and native plants are being razed, and surface and groundwater resources that many animal species and rural residents rely upon are constantly being threatened by these massive sprawling plants.

Rural residents across the province, who Mr. Cohn admits object to these industrial energy facilities, are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in appeals such as Ostrander, the Oak Ridges Moraine projects – Ganaraska, Sumac Ridge, Settlers Landing, and Snowy Ridge fighting to preserve ever dwindling biodiversity and natural heritage as well as public health and safety these projects are destroying.

Something city folk are totally in the dark about.

Jane Zednik, Campbellcroft

A lot of opinions have been expressed since the auditor general’s report finding that the Wynne-McGuinty Liberals had cost Ontario citizens a great deal of money as a result of political interference and poor decision making.

In Martin Regg Cohn’s column he expresses his opinion that “waste and bungling alone cannot explain the recent increases in hydro prices.” He also states that “the mere fact we are paying more doesn’t prove that we are overpaying massively.”

While he has every right to point out that the current situation is not exclusively the responsibility of the current Ontario government, the auditor general deals with facts rather than opinions, and the facts presented by this one time employee of Manitoba Hydro clearly show that the Ontario Liberals are indeed responsible for $37 billion of additional and unnecessary costs, and consequently have burdened us with among the highest hydro rates in North America.

To quote a well known Latin phrase: res ipsa loquitur – “the facts speak for themselves.”

Jonathan Household, Niagara on the Lake

Einstein once described insanity as repeating an action over and over, expecting a different result. This applies especially to the Ontario Liberal government’s attitude to building and rebuilding expensive, dangerous, nuclear-waste-creating power plants; and raises the following question.

Which is better:

a) For Ontario to buy cheap, hydro electric power from Quebec and Manitoba; and to foster renewable power, electricity storage, and energy efficiency (solar and wind); or

b) To ransack the Ontario treasury by spending billions ($13 billion), like the Liberal government, to rebuild nuke plants at Darlington (which won’t come on line until 2026), and which will endanger hundreds of thousands (iodine pills will not mitigate a nuke meltdown.

Do not forget Fukushima! The Tokyo Electric Power Co. has set the costs of the Fukushima nuclear disaster at more than $57 billion (paid for by the government of Japan?) – not including the cost of decommissioning the reactors or cleaning up the mess in the wake of the disaster. Do we really want to risk repeating the folly of Fukushima in Ontario?

If you answered (b) to the question above, you have the limited intelligence of the former and present premiers of Ontario.

Undoubtedly, Ontario taxpayers are the bigger fools for persisting in electing these backward-thinking politicians.

Barry Healey, Toronto

Great summary by Robert Benzie and Rob Ferguson. Bravo. I hope that these researchers will dig deeper into the question: Why are nuclear reactors so expensive? Specifically, “with new-build and refurbishment projects invariably burdened by cost-overruns due to engineering challenges.”

“Engineering challenges” appears to me to be too convenient an explanation, one that is too easily foisted on the public and elected officials that have no recourse than to accept these expert opinions.

The accepted facts in these new-builds and refurbishments are that the parts used in these reactors are rightly: high precision, high quality components that are very expensive commensurate with their critically important functions. But these components are or should be of a known cost.

In Ontario we are dealing with multiple identical Candu reactors surely the expertise should exist within the province on how to build and refurbish these units. If in deed this expertise is not available, then the responsibility for these failings rests at the feet of the top executives at Ontario Power Generation. Is Engineering Challenges a too convenient scapegoat?

Ontarions deserve answers to these questions. It is time to hold the utilities’ executives to account.

Stan Taylor, Brampton

I applaud Martin Regg Cohn for his thorough and sensible explanation of hydro costs. What he does not touch on nor explain is the inefficient and high cost of operating Hydro One. I attended the last round of the Ontario Energy Board hearings as an independent intervener and suggested that Hydro One could cut their operating costs by 10 per cent and they would not even feel it.

I also can find no evidence that the OEB has ever denied Hydro One any rate increase they asked for. I suggested to the board that they require Hydro One to reduce their operating costs by 10 per cent before they were granted any further increases. My suggestion obviously fell on deaf ears.

We have also heard that Hydro One has 10,000 employees making over $100,000 per year. When l asked the representative from Hydro One about it, he replied that he could not confirm that.

As Martin Regg Cohn pointed out in his article, we are still paying for past debt but surely it is not unreasonable to demand that Hydro One be operated efficiently like any private business. I think taxpayers are entitled to an independent review of Hydro One’s operating costs.

Patrick Hurley, Oakville

So Ontario is hell-bent on nuclear! The province has found other sources of energy too costly. It considers nuclear power to be the right price and emissions-free. This calls for a reality check.

Nuclear is anything but cheap. The estimate for Darlington’s refurbishment is $12.8 billion. Experience to date has shown that refurbishment has cost far more than estimated and has taken far longer than predicted.

In order to fill the electricity gap resulting from refurbishing Darlington, the province plans to extend the life of the Pickering station four years beyond when it was supposed to close. How this would “save up to $600 million compared to other means of supplying electricity” is a mystery.

Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli’s assertion that nuclear power is emissions-free is preposterous.

As long as nuclear plants routinely operate, they emit a host of pollutants, many of which are radioactive. Highly radioactive waste (spent fuel) that is continually produced is so radioactive that it must be stored for hundreds of thousands of years, with no scientific guarantee that it would be isolated from the biosphere for as long as it remains hazardous.

Nuclear power plants are very expensive, produce deadly radioactive pollution and create the risk of devastating accidents that cost far more than the power they generate will ever be worth.

The province’s energy plan ensures that Ontario remains a “nuclear-state” for a very long time. This is regrettable, especially as much safer, cleaner alternatives are available.

Let’s not play Russian roulette with our children, our grandchildren and future generations.

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